Sweden’s Tundra raises capital, plans fund launches in 2013

By: Jonathan Boyd | 21 Jan 2013

Tundra Fonder, the Swedish emerging and frontier markets boutique, has raised fresh capital by selling a 9% stake each to Finnish insurers Alandia-Bolagen and Ålands Ömsesidiga Försäkringsbolag, which it intends to use to support fund launches this year.

“Both will contribute competency and experience, and will strengthen the company’s continued development,” said Mattias Martinsson, former CEO and fund manager at Tundra.

Martinsson is being replaced as CEO by Chris Liljefors, who has been head of administration, but who has a longer term background in the fund industry, including working at Enskilda Securities and Brunswick.

The manager also intends to step up its recruitment programme. It has started by hiring Jon Scheiber, who comes from BankInvest in Denmark, where he has been involved in managing emerging markets asset, particularly Asian assets over the past decade.

Tundra has received regulatory approval to launch a global frontier fund, which is expected to take place in about a month’s time. The fund will focus on markets with larger populations, such as Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as some smaller markets such as Burma and Iraq, when it becomes possible to trade these markets. As an actively managed fund it will deviate significantly against its index, which is dominated by the Gulf states of Kuwait, UAE and Qatar. They account for about 50% of the index, but have roughly the same population as Sweden.

The manager will consider single country products, but these require a sufficiently large market, as is the case with Tundra’s Pakistan fund.

Last year, Tundra’s first full calendar year of operations, the business increased its AUM from SEK15m to SEK400 (€46m), as it launched an Agri & Food fund to its existing range of Pakistan and Russia funds.

The manager has not reached out to investors beyond the Nordic markets thus far, but it said there could be changes happening later this year, while in the longer term it sees white label possibilities beyond Europe.